A great parliamentarian

HIS political longevity and rhetorical brilliance have made Tony Benn into that undefined something known to British democracy as “a great parliamentarian”. But there the consensus about him ends. To many people on the left wing of the Labour Party, and to some in the country at large, he is still a hero: the elder statesman and faithful conscience of a formerly socialist party that has gained power but lost its way. For exactly this reason, he is detested by the party's present leaders, who believe that they have rescued Labour from the wilderness only by dint of a long and bitter struggle to detach it from the policies which Mr Benn has upheld for so long, and which for so long made it unelectable.

Mr Benn's announcement this week that he will leave the Commons at the next election after 50 years as an MP has therefore provoked mixed reactions. The reaction of one of his oldest comrades, Gerald Kaufman, was regret—but regret that the great parliamentarian did not quit 20 years sooner. Mr Kaufman is Labour's most waspish MP, better known for the sharpness of his sting than for the generosity of his spirit. It was he who said famously that the socialist manifesto of which Mr Benn was immensely proud, and which sent the party to a crushing election defeat in 1983, was “the longest suicide note in history”. But there can be no doubting that many other Labour people subscribe secretly to the Kaufman indictment of Mr Benn.

The indictment, in essence, is that the great parliamentarian inflicted huge damage on his own party and so caused unnecessary grief to the very working class whose cause he flattered himself he was furthering. As industry secretary in 1974, Mr Benn set up a dotty assortment of workers' co-operatives, all of which collapsed. After 1979's “winter of discontent” pitched Labour into opposition, Mr Benn's sentimental belief in mass democracy turned him into an instrument of the hard-left activists who were trying to capture Labour's local parties. In 1980, the election for the deputy leadership which he lost by a whisker to Denis Healey created the schism that prompted moderates like Roy Jenkins and David Owen to break away and set up the Social Democratic Party. He went on to compound the damage by challenging Neil Kinnock for the leadership in 1988, and fighting against all of Mr Kinnock's subsequent efforts to refresh the party's policies and image. He especially hated the adoption of a red rose as the party symbol, which he lampooned by writing an alternative version of “the Red Flag” that began: “The people's rose in shades of pinks/Gets up my nostrils and it stinks.”

It is no wonder that the people who see Mr Benn's career in this light are disinclined to wish him a happy retirement. What can be said in his mitigation? First, his early and sustained instinct to oppose privilege and all its trappings was admirable. From the vantage point of the supposedly classless 1990s, the effort which Anthony Wedgwood Benn put into reinventing himself as plain Tony Benn may sound like an affectation. His struggle nearly 40 years ago to renounce his peerage so that he could sit as a commoner in the elected house seems a small thing now that hereditary peerage itself is on the point of being evicted from Westminster. But the Britain of those days was a more hidebound place, and Mr Benn was right to be a moderniser. He seems to have had a natural, genuine and lifelong sympathy for the disadvantaged, but was not always a doctrinaire socialist: as Harold Wilson's postmaster general the young Mr Benn was preoccupied mainly with trying (he failed) to remove the queen's head from postage stamps.

Second, no one man deserves all the blame for Labour being so much slower than the electorate to accept in the 1970s and 1980s that its policies of public ownership and high taxation had turned into an abject failure. The whole party was too slow on the uptake. The trouble with Mr Benn is that he never learned, moving left as the party moved right. His admirers construe this as a courageous adherence to unchanging principles, but there is another way of looking at it. Wilson said that Mr Benn immatured with age, and at 74 his age is considerable. He remains a great orator, with a powerful sense, if questionable grasp, of history. At the fringes of the party conference, to which he is nowadays consigned, he still moves audiences who have not heard it all before with his sentimental vision of the Labour movement as the descendant of the 17th-century Levellers. The anti-Americanism that lay behind his attacks on NATO policy in Kosovo still goes down all too well on Labour's left. But for the most part, in the party and in the Commons, many people have stopped listening to him, and those who do are increasingly inclined to praise the manner of what he says and ignore the matter.

Perhaps that is what being a great parliamentarian amounts to: a rather grander version of the soap-box orators at Hyde Park's Speakers' Corner, whose fulmination is not closely listened to but whose mere presence is supposed to reassure onlookers that all is well with democracy. Mr Benn claims that he is not retiring from politics, merely reassessing the institution of Parliament and choosing to make his contribution elsewhere. He says that the level of political discourse in Parliament is shallow, abusive and personal. Parliament, he has decided after half a century, is “always the last place to get the message”. But he was recently thrilled to see his son, albeit a Blairite, win a seat there.

Mr Benn implies that he is leaving because of New Labour's refusal to make room for dissidents like him. But even Tony Blair is highly unlikely to try to purge him—it would not be worth the bother. The real reason for his going is that nobody is listening to him. This is not Mr Blair's fault. It is because most voters have decided that on most of the big issues he has been wrong. The only thing they seem willing to give him credit for is that he was wrong with the best of intentions.